July162012

Stevan Harnad, professor of electronics and computer science at Southampton University, said the government was facing an expensive bill in supporting gold open access over the green open access model.

He said UK universities and research funders had been leading the world in the movement towards "green" open access that requires researchers to self-archive their journal articles on the web, and make them free for all.

"The Finch committee's recommendations look superficially as if they are supporting open access, but in reality they are strongly biased in favour of the interests of the publishing industry over the interests of UK research," he said.

"Instead of recommending that the UK build on its historic lead in providing cost-free green open access, the committee has recommended spending a great deal of extra money — scarce research money — to pay publishers for "gold open access publishing. If the Finch committee recommendations are heeded, as David Willetts now proposes, the UK will lose both its global lead in open access and a great deal of public money — and worldwide open access will be set back at least a decade," he said.

May302012

Wide Open Future of the Art Museum (TED) -- text of an interview with curator at the Walters Art Museum about CC-licensing content: reasons for it, value to society, value to the institution. What I say in a very abbreviated form in my talk is that people go to the Louvre because they’ve seen the Mona Lisa; the reason people might not be going to an institution is because they don’t know what’s in your institution. (via Carl Malamud)

Twitter Resiles From API-Driven Site (Twitter) -- performance was the reason to return to server-assembled pages, vs their previous "client makes API calls and assembles the page itself".

Stripe Einhorn -- language-independent shared socket manager. Einhorn makes it easy to have multiple instances of an application server listen on the same port. You can also seamlessly restart your workers without dropping any requests. Einhorn requires minimal application-level support, making it easy to use with an existing project.

Petition the Whitehouse For Access to Taxpayer-Funded Research (Whitehouse) -- We believe in the power of the Internet to foster innovation, research, and education. Requiring the published results of taxpayer-funded research to be posted on the Internet in human and machine readable form would provide access to patients and caregivers, students and their teachers, researchers, entrepreneurs, and other taxpayers who paid for the research. Expanding access would speed the research process and increase the return on our investment in scientific research. Sign this and spread the word: it's time to end the insanity of hiding away research to protect a handful of publishers' eighteenth century business models.

April272012

Joe Wikert, O'Reilly GM and publisher, asked this week, "What if DRM goes away?" As kismet would have it, publisher Tom Doherty Associates, which publishes popular science fiction/fantasy imprint Tor under Macmillan, stepped up to drop DRM and find out. An announcement post on Tor.com stated that by July, the company's "entire list of e-books will be available DRM-free." President and publisher Tom Doherty said for the announcement:

"Our authors and readers have been asking for this for a long time. They're a technically sophisticated bunch, and DRM is a constant annoyance to them. It prevents them from using legitimately purchased e-books in perfectly legal ways, like moving them from one kind of e-reader to another."

Author Cory Doctorow said the move "might be the watershed for ebook DRM, the turning point that marks the moment at which all ebooks end up DRM-free. It's a good day." Author Charlie Stross took a look at the big picture and what this might mean not only for the future of publishers, but for book retailers, supply chains and ebook reading technology. In part, he said the oligopoly may be in jeopardy:

"Longer term, removing the requirement for DRM will lower the barrier to entry in ebook retail, allowing smaller retailers (such as Powells) to compete effectively with the current major incumbents. This will encourage diversity in the retail sector, force the current incumbents to interoperate with other supply sources (or face an exodus of consumers), and undermine the tendency towards oligopoly. This will, in the long term, undermine the leverage the large vendors currently have in negotiating discount terms with publishers while improving the state of midlist sales."

Jeremy Trevathan, publisher at Tor UK's parent Pan Macmillan, told The Guardian that Macmillan has "no thought of extending [the drop of DRM] beyond science fiction and fantasy publishing. But it's in the air. We've not talked about this to other publishers, but I can't imagine they haven't been thinking about this, too."

The future of publishing has a busy schedule. Stay up to date with Tools of Change for Publishing events, publications, research and resources. Visit us at oreilly.com/toc.

Harvard offers up big data and open access research

Harvard University recently made a couple of notable moves to open up access to its data and research. Last week, Harvard's faculty and advisory council sent a memo to faculty members regarding periodical subscriptions. The memo opened: "We write to communicate an untenable situation facing the Harvard Library. Many large journal publishers have made the scholarly communication environment fiscally unsustainable and academically restrictive."

"According to the Harvard memo, journal subscriptions are now so high that to continue them 'would seriously erode collection efforts in many other areas, already compromised.' The memo asks faculty members to encourage their professional organisations to take control of scholarly publishing, and to consider submitting their work to open access journals and resigning from editorial boards of journals that are not open access."

This week, The New York Times (NYT) reported that "Harvard is making public the information on more than 12 million books, videos, audio recordings, images, manuscripts, maps, and more things inside its 73 libraries." Access to this volume of metadata is likely to fuel innovation for developers. The NYT report stated:

"At a one-day test run with 15 hackers working with information on 600,000 items, [David Weinberger, co-director of Harvard's Library Lab] said, people created things like visual timelines of when ideas became broadly published, maps showing locations of different items, and a 'virtual stack' of related volumes garnered from various locations."

The post noted the "metadata will be available for bulk download both from Harvard and from the Digital Public Library of America, which is an effort to create a national public library online."

News scoops for sale or rent

There also was a dustup in the news space this week. It began with Felix Salmon's post at Reuters suggesting the New York Times could rake in revenue by selling advance access to its feature stories to hedge funds. (This was all brought on by the newspaper's feature piece on a Wal-Mart bribe inquiry on a Saturday and the market response the following Monday.)

"The main potential problem I see here is that if such an arrangement were in place, corporate whistleblowers might be risking prosecution as insider traders. But I'm sure the lawyers could work that one out. The church-lady types would I'm sure faint with horror. But if hedge funds are willing to pay the NYT large sums of money to be able to get a glimpse of stories before they're made fully public, what fiduciary could simply turn such hedge funds away?"

"One of the things that bothers me about this idea is that I think there is still some kind of public-service or public-policy value in journalism, and especially the news — I don't think it is just another commodity that should be designed to make as much money as possible. And if the New York Times were to take stories that are arguably of social significance and provide them to hedge funds in advance, I think that would make it a very different type of entity than it is now. What if it was a story about a dangerous drug or national security?"

"The journalism-ethics angle to this hasn't really been fleshed out, though. Mathew Ingram, for instance, says that if news is being put out in the public service, then it shouldn't be 'just another commodity'; if the NYT were to go down this road, then 'that would make it a very different type of entity than it is now.' It's all very vague and hand-wavey."

All three posts in this back-and-forth exchange (here, here and here) as well as the debate on Twitter that Ingram storified here are well worth the read.

March212012

Members of Consumers International (CI), the only global campaigning voice for consumers, came together from around the world to discuss and set an agenda for advocacy on these issues, at the first global summit Consumers in the Information Society: Access, Fairness and Representation held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia on 8 and 9 March 2012. This book contains the research reports and working papers presented at that conference.

March202012

Evolutionary biologist Michael Eisen made this t-shirt design in support of the Elsevier boycott.

Academic research is behind bars and an online boycott
by 8,209 researchers (and counting) is seeking to set it free…well,
more free than it has been. The boycott targets Elsevier, the publisher
of popular journals like Cell and The Lancet, for its
aggressive business practices, but opposition was electrified by
Elsevier’s backing of a Congressional bill titled the Research Works Act (RWA). Though lesser known than the other high-profile, privacy-related bills SOPA and PIPA, the act was slated to reverse the Open Access Policy
enacted by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2008 that granted
the public free access to any article derived from NIH-funded research.
Now, only a month after SOPA and PIPA were defeated thanks to the wave
of online protests, the boycotting researchers can chalk up their first
win: Elsevier has withdrawn its support of the RWA, although the company downplayed the role of the boycott in its decision, and the oversight committee killed it right away.

But the fight for open access is just getting started.

Seem dramatic? Well, here’s a little test. Go to any of the top
academic journals in the world and try to read an article. The full
article, mind you…not just the abstract or the first few paragraphs. Hit
a paywall? Try an article written 20 or 30 years ago in an obscure
journal. Just look up something on PubMed then head to JSTOR where a
vast archive of journals have been digitized for reference. Denied? Not
interested in paying $40 to the publisher to rent the article for a few
days or purchase it for hundreds of dollars either? You’ve just logged
one of the over 150 million failed attempts per year to access an article on JSTOR.
Now consider the fact that the majority of scientific articles in the
U.S., for example, has been funded by government-funded agencies, such
as the National Science Foundation, NIH, Department of Defense,
Department of Energy, NASA, and so on. So while taxpayer money has
fueled this research, publishers charge anyone who wants to actually see
the results for themselves, including the authors of the articles.

Paying a high price for academic journals isn’t anything new, but the
events that unfolded surrounding the RWA was the straw that broke the
camel’s back. It began last December when the RWA was submitted to
Congress. About a month later, Timothy Gowers, a mathematics professor
at Cambridge University, posted
rather innocently to his primarily mathematics-interested audience his
particular problems with Elsevier, citing exorbitant prices and forcing
libraries to purchase journal bundles rather than individual titles. But
clearly, it was Elsevier’s support of the RWA that was his call to
action. Two days later, he launched the boycott of Elsevier at thecostofknowledge.com, calling upon his fellow academics to refuse to work with the publisher in any capacity.

Seemingly right out of Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point, researchers started taking a stand in droves. And the boycott of Elsevier continues on, though with less gusto now that the RWA is dead.
It’s important to point out though that the boycott is not aimed at
forcing Elsevier to make the journals free, but protesting the way it
does its business and the fact that it has profits four times larger than related publishers. The Statement of Purpose
for the protest indicates that the specific issues that researchers
have with Elsevier varies, but “…what all the signatories do agree on is
that Elsevier is an exemplar of everything that is wrong with the
current system of commercial publication of mathematics journals.”

The advantages of open access to researchers have been known for some time, but its popularity has struggled.

It’s clear that all forms of print media, including newspapers, magazines, and books, are in a crisis in the digital era (remember Borders closing?).
The modern accepted notion that information should be free has
crippled publishers and many simply waited too long to evolve into new
pay models. When academic journals went digital, they locked up access
behind paywalls or tried to sell individual articles
at ridiculous prices. Academic research is the definition of premium,
timely content and prices reflected an incredibly small customer base
(scientific researchers around the globe) who desperately needed the
content as soon as humanly possible. Hence, prices were set high enough
that libraries with budgets remained the primary customers, until of
course library budgets got slashed, but academics vying for tenure,
grants, relevance, or prestige continued to publish in these same
journals. After all, where else could they turn…that is, besides the Public Library of Science (PLoS) project?

In all fairness, some journals get it. The Open Directory maintains a list of journals that switched
from paywalls to open access or are experimenting with alternative
models. Odds are very high that this list will continue to grow, but how
fast? And more importantly, will the Elsevier boycott empower
researchers to get on-board the open access paradigm, even if it meant
having to reestablish themselves in an entirely new ecosystem of
journals?

As the numbers of dissenting researchers continue to climb, calls for open access to research are translating into new legislation…and the expected opposition.
But let’s hope that some are thinking about breaking free from the
journal model altogether and discovering creative, innovative ways to
get their research findings out there, like e-books or apps that would
make the research compelling and interactive. Isn’t it about time
researchers took back control of their work?

If you are passionate about the issue of open access to research,
you’ll want to grab a cup of coffee and nestle in for this Research
Without Borders video from Columbia University, which really captures
the challenge of transition from the old publishing model to the new
digital world:

January052012

Here are a few of the data stories that caught my attention this week.

Uber's dynamic pricing

Many passengers using the luxury car service Uber on New Year's Eve suffered from sticker shock when they saw that a hefty surcharge had been added to their bills — a charge ranging from 3 to more than 6 times the regular cost of an Uber fare. Some patrons took to Twitter to complain about the pricing, and Uber responded with several blogposts and Quora answers, trying to explain the startup's usage of "dynamic pricing."

... when our utilization is approaching too high of levels to continue to provide low ETA's and good dispatches, we raise prices to reduce demand and increase supply. On New Year's Eve (and just after midnight), this system worked perfectly; demand was too high, so the price bumped up. Over and over and over and over again.

In other words, in order to maintain the service that Uber is known for — reliability — the company adjusted prices based on the supply and demand for transportation. And on New Year's Eve, says Narducci, "As for how the prices got that high, at a super simplistic level, it was because things went right."

TechCrunch contributor Semil Shah points to other examples of dynamic pricing, such as for airfares and hotels, and argues that we might see more of this in the future. "Starting now, consumers should also prepare to experience the underbelly of this phenomenon, a world where prices for goods and services that are in demand, either in quantity or at a certain time, aren't the same price for each of us."

But Reuters' Felix Salmon argues that this sort of algorithmic and dynamic pricing might not work well for most customers. It isn't simply that the prices for Uber car rides are high (they are always higher than a taxi anyway). He contends that the human brain really can't — or perhaps doesn't want to — handle this sort of complicated cost/benefit analysis for a decision like "should I take a cab or call Uber or just walk home." As such, he calls Uber:

... a car service for computers, who always do their sums every time they have to make a calculation. Humans don't work that way. And the way that Uber is currently priced, it's always going to find itself in a cognitive zone of discomfort as far as its passengers are concerned.

Strata 2012 — The 2012 Strata Conference, being held Feb. 28-March 1 in Santa Clara, Calif., will offer three full days of hands-on data training and information-rich sessions. Strata brings together the people, tools, and technologies you need to make data work.

Apache Hadoop reaches v1.0

The Apache Software Foundation announced that Apache Hadoop has reached v1.0, an indication that the big data tool has achieved a certain level of stability and enterprise-readiness.

V1.0 "reflects six years of development, production experience, extensive testing, and feedback from hundreds of knowledgeable users, data scientists, and systems engineers, bringing a highly stable, enterprise-ready release of the fastest-growing big data platform," said the ASF in its announcement.

The designation by the Apache Software Foundation reaffirms the interest in and development of Hadoop, a major trend in 2011 and likely to be such again in 2012.

Proposed bill would repeal open access for federal-funded research

What's the future for open data, open science, and open access in 2012? Hopefully, a bill introduced late last month isn't a harbinger of what's to come.

October272011

Using the $35 Tablet from India (VentureBeat) -- nice description of the tablet and what it's like to use. What makes the Aakash tablet different is that its creators didn't strive for perfection. Instead, the emphasis was on getting the product into the market quickly so it could be adopted, tinkered with, and improved over time. As Wadhwa said, "to get the cost down, you have to make some compromises."

Intellectual Property in ACTA and the TPP: Lessons Not Learned -- ACTA, therefore, as the closest thing we have to a "high protection consensus", ought to be seen as a kind of ceiling to what is possible or desirable for the present. As I will further show, however, this is far from the approach being adopted by the US in the TPP negotiations. The US' apparent determination to treat its existing FTAs, and ACTA, as a floor, rather than a ceiling, may well undermine the whole purpose of the TPP negotiations. (via Michael Geist)

September292011

Princeton Open Access Report (PDF) -- academics will need written permission to assign copyright of a paper to a journal. Of course, the faculty already had exclusive rights in the scholarly articles they write; the main effect of this new policy is to prevent them from giving away all their rights when they publish in a journal. (via CC Huang)

Good Faith Collaboration -- a book on Wikipedia's culture, from MIT Press. Distributed, appropriately, under a Creative Commons Non-Commercial Share-Alike license.

The Local-Global Flip -- an EDGE conversation (or monologue) by Jaron Lanier that contains more thought-provocation per column-inch than anything else you'll read this week. [I]ncreasing efficiency by itself doesn't employ people. There is a difference between saving and making money when you're unemployed. Once you're already rich, saving money and making money is the same thing, but for people who are on the bottom or even in the middle classes, saving money doesn't help you if you don't have the money to save in the first place. and The beauty of money is it creates a system of people leaving each other alone by mutual agreement. It's the only invention that does that that I'm aware of. In a world of finite limits where you don't have an infinite West you can expand into, money is the thing that gives you a little bit of peace and quiet, where you can say, "It's my money, I'm spending it". and I'm astonished at how readily a great many people I know, young people, have accepted a reduced economic prospect and limited freedoms in any substantial sense, and basically traded them for being able to screw around online. There are just a lot of people who feel that being able to get their video or their tweet seen by somebody once in a while gets them enough ego gratification that it's okay with them to still be living with their parents in their 30s, and that's such a strange tradeoff. And if you project that forward, obviously it does become a problem. are things I'm still chewing on, many days after first reading.

Trolled by Gerry Sussman (Bryan O'Sullivan) -- Bryan gave a tutorial on Haskell to a conference on leading-edge programming languages and distributed systems. At one point, Gerry had a pretty amusing epigram to offer. "Haskell is the best of the obsolete programming languages!" he pronounced, with a mischievous look. Now, I know when I’m being trolled, so I said nothing and waited a moment, whereupon he continued, "but don’t take it the wrong way—I think they’re all obsolete!"

December292009

Turning The Page Online -- historic science books in high-resolution online. Hookes Micrografia was the first view of the microscopic world, and his astonishingly detailed and beautiful illustrations are there to view and print.

Detailed Psychology of Trolls -- You might be surprised to learn that Trolls readily engage in long debates with fellow Trolls - people, that is, whom they know to be perverse and cunning conversation hackers. Apparently, this does not detract them from wasting hours on fruitless debates that are blatantly rigged and full of sophistry. Few Trolls would be happy with debating only fellow Trolls (semi-literate teenagers and hard-boiled fundamentalists are so much tastier - even though they, too, might be trolling you). Yet most of them, every once in a while, enjoy having an absurd argument with another pig-head. Good on the "know your enemy" basis. (via MindHacks)

Theme Issue -- a Royal Society publication ran a special open access issue focusing on "personal perspectives of the life sciences", where top scientists write about what they think is important. It's good to see more toes dipped into open access, but I'd love to see more journals (particularly those of professions and associations) move to an entirely open access model. (via SciBlogs)

Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python (2ed) -- free ebook that teaches how to program in Python, using games as the motivating examples. Nominally for 10-12 year old children, but (naturally) accessible to adults too. I have not read it, but approve of the attempt.